


Bring Me Back a Star

by keire_ke



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Body Horror, M/M, Outer Space, Spaceships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 12:41:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4180227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/pseuds/keire_ke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers, Tony thought, was a diabolical genius. Oh sure, his brilliance wasn't news – there was a reason he'd helmed one of the most ambitious projects of the century – the news, or more precisely the novelty, was the qualifying adjective. Steve got to people with his vision and his drive, he got into their minds and their pockets (not Tony's, curiously enough, he balked at taking Tony's money), and in the end the world rolled obediently where he told it to roll.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bring Me Back a Star

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silverfoxflower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverfoxflower/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Drowned Man's Cove](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2263335) by [silverfoxflower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverfoxflower/pseuds/silverfoxflower). 



> Betaed by Nyxira.

Steve Rogers, Tony thought, was a diabolical genius. Oh sure, his brilliance wasn't news – there was a reason he'd helmed one of the most ambitious projects of the century – the news, or more precisely the novelty, was the qualifying adjective. Steve got to people with his vision and his drive, he got into their minds and their pockets (not Tony's, curiously enough, he balked at taking Tony's money), and in the end the world rolled obediently where he told it to roll.

Genius. Madness. All he needed was a jealous competitor who had the emperor's ear and they'd have a full-blown Oscar movie at their hands, albeit with a less stiff soundtrack, if Tony had anything to say.

And boy, did he ever.

"Permission to enter the bridge, Captain!" proclaimed Tony Stark, entering stage left, meandering into what he knew full well was the mess hall. In his hands he held a flannel rag with which he scrubbed engine grease off his hands. "Looking good, folks! Are we ready to boldly go where no man has gone before? Man, the twentieth century sure had done our job in the quote department!"

"You don't need permission to enter the mess hall, Tony," Steve said calmly, deep into hour four of his staring contest with the great big beyond.

"Man, I was hoping permission wouldn't come up. I did!" He cast a quick look to make sure his entrance made enough of a splash in the fishbowl of the hand-picked crew of USS _Avenger_ , a name imbued with so much "duh" Tony was kind of kicking himself for not noticing it sooner. "But, what can I do. So, speaking of this thing that came up organically, the thing being permission. Mission. Anyone ever notice how the word 'mission' is right up there in 'permission'? No? Made me think."

Steve, as usual, was pretending to ignore him, but it wasn't like Tony couldn't see his impressive triceps freeze and lock down. Yep, Captain America could stare into the uncharted star fields, which he couldn't even see because they were out beyond hyperspace, all he wanted; Tony had googled his number and had it on speed-dial.

"I'm not going to pretend I didn't maybe commit slight treason," Tony continued, absorbed in his task of seeming like he was trying to get his hands cleaner, "or mutiny, or whatever's the proper nautical term. Does the nautical terminology still apply when we're cruising the open skies? Feels like we should be expanding our vocabularies instead of paying homage. But I digress. I think you've been lying to us, Cap."

"I have no idea what you mean." Steve didn't move from his post, even when the faint reflection of the crew in the reinforced glass showed him their overwhelming surprise.

"Sir?" Maria ventured, looking between the two of them.

"What I mean," Tony said, with far less levity, "is that you have lied to us about the course we're taking and its 'road untraveled' status."

"I did not." Steve turned, at long last, and looked his crew in the eye in turn. "No human ship had taken the course we're presently on. Maria will confirm."

"No, not gonna contest that," Tony said, waving aside Hill's confirmations. "True, the course is brand spanking new. But for once it's not the journey, is it, Capsicle? It's the destination."

Natasha set aside her datapad and frowned. "Steve?"

"Where are we going, Steve?" Sam asked.

For his part Steve held out longer than Tony suspected he could when pressed to commit to a lie. Good ol' Cap, skirting the edge between truth and a complete fucking falsehood with the grace of a gazelle, unless the likes of Tony Stark stood up to his bullshit. Genius, meet your match.

" _Brooklyn_ ," Steve admitted eventually. "We're heading for _Brooklyn_."

"I don't know what that means." Thor folded his arms and stared at Steve and then Tony, who had suspected, and while his suspicion should really be counted as 88% proof fact, he was that proficient at guestimation, he still felt like he got kicked where he really shouldn't have been kicked. "Brooklyn is on Earth, is it not? It is your own place of birth, in New York?"

"He means the ship." Tony braced himself against a table on which Sam had laid out his papers. "He means USS fucking _Brooklyn_."

"I don't understand," Wanda and Pietro said at once, and continued alternating thoughts. "We set course for nearly twenty light years away. How do you know there's a ship there? There are only three old generation ships which could have made it that far, two are grounded and the third is presently heading in the opposite direction."

"We don't know, that's the point!" Tony jabbed an accusing oil-rimmed fingernail at the captain. "We'll waste eons and quadrillions to find an empty stretch of nothing."

Steve looked away. "Based on the final data push, that's exactly where she should be. There were no significant obstacles from her last confirmed position, so based on the data available we could calculate her position exactly."

"So instead of finding a brave new world, like we promised, you have us chasing a ghost ship?"

"I thought you of all people would understand," Steve said quietly, and if that wasn't just the reddest possible sheet to throw at a bull. Tony threw his rag into the corner, to Natasha's palpable disapproval, and straightened to his full, unassuming height, drawing on his very assuming rage.

"We're supposed to be fucking exploring! Testing this glorious piece of technology! Doing cool shit!"

"We are! We're just… making a stop along the way."

"Steve," Sam said, and his voice was unbearably soft. Steve closed his eyes and clenched his fists.

"I understand you have reservations," he said. "But I ask you to indulge me. The course and the mission have both been approved by Commander Fury."

"But not Director Carter. I take it no one but Fury knows?" Tony dug his stained fingernails into his palms, until he could really feel the sting. That was what tipped him off in the first place. He hadn't meant to snoop, he just happened to be looking for the ship manifest and specs when he came across the official orders, bearing the signatures of one Nicholas J. Fury and him alone. Tony, even though administrative trivia weren't even close to his field, thought it odd, as the science division of the fleet – including space exploration – answered to Director Carter. "What happened to truth, justice and the American way?"

"What is the mission, Steve?" Natasha asked meanwhile, already deep in the spider trance that fooled everyone into spilling their secrets for her perusal.

"Search and rescue."

"Wow." Tony marched straight up to his nominal superior, mindless of the height difference. "Rogers, are you mad? They are dust by now. Space dust. Search, I'll give you that, but rescue?"

"The cryo units may have survived. Even back then they were equipped with their own power cells, and they were plugged in to every power source onboard. _Brooklyn_ was designed so that in an event of a catastrophe the cryo units get priority."

"Yes, except they were not in cryo!"

"You don't know that."

Tony threw his hands in the air. "That's what you want to do with your life? Chase ghosts?"

"Unlike you?" Steve clenched his hands and glared. "Then riddle me this, why are you here, if it's not to chase Howard's ghost?"

"I'm here because we're on board the most advanced piece of technology man had ever built, my father be damned!" And if anyone was going to take the newly minted hyperdrive for a spin it was going to be Tony. He fully intended to get into history books before Howard fucking Stark, who had an unfortunate head start by being born some forty odd years earlier and dying famously on the previous most advanced piece of technology man had ever built.

"They could still be alive."

"After twenty years of floating in space? Yeah, as if," Tony said, but something cold clenched around his heart all the same. Steve believed in his search and rescue, and if that didn't spell they were locked in a durasteel tincan with a madman, nothing would.

"Nonetheless, we are holding course," Steve said. "The mission has been sanctioned by Commander Fury. We are going after USS _Brooklyn_ with everything we've got."

"I don't want to know what you did to get him to sign off on it," Tony muttered, as Steve slowly made his way out of the hall, to a fanfare so silent it was practically a negation of sound. No one looked up, and even Natasha didn't slide into the Captain's proverbial chair, as was her job description. For a long moment they were just a bunch of random strays, floating in space, no structure and no command.

"I still don't understand," Wanda tried again, dropping heavy on the Rs. "Why is _Brooklyn_ so important?"

"It was the first ship to achieve interstellar travel," Sam said into the silence. "The first human expedition beyond the solar system. Pretty impressive for its time, but nowhere near hyperspace, so their planned destination was a mere four light years away. Something went wrong, though, they overshot their target, contact was lost, and no one really knows what happened. The last thing we learned was that the AI on board malfunctioned and cut off all power, including life support."

"Then what are we looking for?" Wanda asked and Tony immediately felt a black hole of "I know something intensely personal about you, but won't mention it" form around him.

"Alright, getting to the sad parts of the story I notice, so let me nip it in the bud: yes, my father was on that ship when it went dark," he said, trying not to roll his eyes. "Very tragic, poor orphan Tony. Let me spare you some tears: in his last message home he wished me a happy fourth birthday, despite the fact that when he was leaving I'd just turned six and he'd been gone for a year. He'd also got the date wrong, so believe you me, I had the tragic loss padded. Sadly, the same can't be said for Cap." Tony paused, took a deep breath, and continued in a slightly less annoyed voice. "To the best of my knowledge the crew of that ship – which was a pretty much a space-yacht, much like the _Avenger_ , so only half a dozen people or so – comprised every single person our social butterfly of a captain knew in his life, save Carter, who was in mission control at the time. Rogers went into cardiac episode so severe they put him in cryo, because no one had a clue how to fix the primary source of information on _Brooklyn_ , now that her whole crew was in happy joyful space monster land."

"The captain has heart problems?" Thor asked, his glowing golden goodness shining through a body made for punching people in a bar.

"Not anymore." Tony shrugged, retrieved his rag and resumed playing with it. "There was this guy called Erskine, he used to work with my father back when. He pioneered cybernetics on a micro scale. Rogers became his first human test-subject and a raging success, as you can imagine."

"So… What do we do?" Natasha folded her arms across her chest, betraying no inclination either way.

"What can we do? His Majesty the Captainship went and got us _orders_."

"Tony…"

"That ship is dead. And if Cap's obsessed, that's his deal, he had no right to drag us into it, too! I say we mutiny and kick him out of voting privileges."

"Mutiny?" Thor rose in his seat, thunder in his eyes. "Beware your words, friend. We were not forced into joining, not one of us! The captain asked us to follow him in good faith."

"He lied to us!"

"He is not obliged to disclose all, if he feels the mission would suffer for it."

Tony let out a long sigh. "Yeah, yeah. Precious valuable intel. Worth killing a whole crew for."

"Be fair, Tony," Sam said. "Steve would never let us near that ship without a full briefing."

"Not if he thought we might not want to go, after a full debriefing," Tony tried, but some things simply weren't correct. "Yeah, I know, weak. Ignore that. But the broader point still stands."

"I could be wrong," Natasha said, her voice low, indicating being wrong was the last thing anyone would ever accuse her of being, double, surprisingly asexual, entendre fully intended, "but it looks like _you_ are hiding something."

"Do you want to know what's on that ship before the official debriefing?" Tony challenged. "Let's me show you what's on that ship, then. Vision, there's a folder of videos on my personal drive, the one that's not porn. Unlock the new semi-legal one and play file triple-ex, 32557038-FUBAR, please. Access code: rattlesnake."

The main screen flickered and the onboard AI displayed the frame of a video shot through with static: a cargo hold of a ship several decades out of date, rendered in noisy greenish-grey. The timestamp in the corner inched forward, unforgiving, and ten seconds after the video began something heavy was thrown across the empty space, leaving a dark smudge along the way. Tony anticipated the sudden drop of temperature when everyone present realized it was a person, a human being, wrapped in a heavy pressure suit, all the rage in the distant past of twenty-five years ago.

He anticipated the crackling electrical shock when they realized the streak of red – because it could only be red, even if the video was a greenish-grey – was coming from where the left arm should have been.

"That," Tony said into the polar silence, "is Sergeant James Barnes. Clever fellow: earned a PhD in psychology, specialized in sorting out trauma. I presume that made him useful on a deep-space mission. A people person, my esteemed father used to say. Could wrangle a herd of cats into doing his bidding by sitting on the floor and stealing their snacks. He was the first officer of _Brooklyn_ , somehow, don't ask me how the fleet command works.  Rogers' best friend and true love. That last part I'm mostly making up, but it sure as fuck wasn't Howard going down that made Steve's ticker go boom."

Sam looked his way, eyebrows raised just enough to convey surprise, but not enough to risk sarcasm in the face of the poor dying bastard on-screen. "The way the stories go, Steve and Director Carter had something going."

"I wouldn't trust my memory, I was six. What I know now is that this video surfaced shortly after the ship went MIA and Rogers, who was five feet tall and weighed as much as a cocker spaniel, had to be restrained and put in cryo, because not even Carter could talk him down."

On the screen Sergeant Barnes was fighting to heave himself to his knees, pushing at the floor with his one trembling arm, and kudos, Tony thought: he'd have rolled over and awaited the inevitable if his limb disappeared down a blender. Unfortunately, the gravity suddenly gave way, and a poorly timed push sent him spiraling to the ceiling like a really, really grotesque watering feature. But the video didn't end there, because clearly deep-space horror was what they all needed to take to their sleeping quarters.

A shadow appeared in the half-light of the open door, the thing casting it just out of the camera's frame. Barnes saw it, too. His face was barely visible through the closed visor of the helmet, but what was evident was fear, the kind that a man felt looking into the swiftly closing jaws of a predator that just wouldn't quit. And then the gravity engines kicked back in, Barnes slammed against the floor with enough force to crack his visor, and the shadow was still closing in, close enough now for the camera to pick up the shape of it. The thing was humanoid, but only in the very broadest of sense: it was taller, if Tony was any judge, but it was taller by means of building around something not that big, with limbs that didn't quite look organic, if the occasional flash of reflected light was any indication. What looked organic was the presumably red splatter covering its entire right side.

The video ended a fraction of a second before the nightmarish claws reached Barnes's face.

"It's not that I don't feel for the guy," Tony said into the ensuing silence. "I do. And hell if I'm not curious, gonna admit that, I actually campaigned to go looking, once upon a time. But we're not exactly prepared for this. How many of you have been in actual combat?" He meant it as a rhetorical question, really, a pit stop on the way to another rant, so he felt like the universe was betraying him in a very fundamental way when every single person present raised their hands. "You have got to be kidding me!"

"I have been the commander of my father's special forces," said Thor, a princeling of some strange, foreign nation, voluntarily exiled from his homeland due to inheritance dispute. "I have experience in hand-to-hand combat and field command, although I concede our captain is my superior in terms of strategy."

"Red Room," Natasha said, and not a word more, like it explained everything. Actually, Tony was kind of willing to go out on a limb and assume she killed more people than he'd met, she had that look about her.

Sam smiled apologetically. "Air force, search and rescue. Three tours."

"Pietro and I belonged to a guerilla group in our home country," Wanda admitted quietly, and her hands glowed a faint red, while her brother pressed his shoulder against hers, his face grim. "We know war."

"Sorry Tony," Maria said, smiling faintly. Tony had been wondering why Steve okayed Lieutenant Maria Hill of all people. Maybe he should have been suspicious from the very beginning, and not a mere parsec away from their destination, and wow, was his face red. It was like the universe was playing the clues on a Jumbotron in neon pink all along, and he was only catching up now. Their twin doctors had guerilla groups in their resumes. What the fuck.

"Clint, come on, don't fail me! You grew up in a circus, didn't you? You joined the fleet because you watched one too many Star Trek episodes, yes?"

"I did, yeah. Binged religiously, every weekend, between archery practice. Then SHIELD snatched me up, back when they had a wetwork division. I was barely eighteen. I joined the fleet by following Fury out the right door."

"Right. Of course." Tony closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Please tell me you didn't know what he was getting us into?"

"I suspected," Natasha said. "I'm not exactly the exploring type. Xenobiological specimens are hard to interrogate."

"We didn't know the specifics," Clint volunteered. "I'm pretty sure we got the same initial briefing. But… if it makes you feel any better, I'm willing to back you up if you want out."

Tony wasn't going to admit he wholly and completely did not know how to feel. "So, I take it the rest of you are staying."

"I'm with Rogers," Natasha said. Sam nodded, too, though Tony was a little relieved to see his hands twitch. An ally he was not, but it was a comfort to know Tony wasn't the only one who was feeling a little betrayed.

"It would be dishonorable to abandon my commander in his hour of need," said the man whose name gave him two choices: embrace the God of Thunder, or live to juxtapose him. Tony guessed the choice was made for Thor when he sprung from the womb looking a Norse god, probably holding a baby hammer. "I will remain."

"And you say that knowing full well that this video – the video on which Steve's boy gets his arm ripped off by a thing we know nothing about – is twenty-five years old, and the best we can hope for is a floating graveyard." Tony closed his eyes, thought about the escape pods, about the beacons and the seven brand new freighters with hyperspace capabilities which could be picking him up within the week. "Oh, fuck all of you. Please at least tell me we have a better plan than pulling up and knocking."

"I will not ask you to come with me," said a quiet voice from the door. Rogers swept the room with his gaze and looked down.

"Oh look, the good Captain deigned to show his face again," Tony said without real heat to it. "And it looks like he's asking for volunteers."

"Well, he found some." Natasha was looking away, but her mouth was curling. That was the diabolical genius at work, Tony thought. He tricked us all into coming, he lied by omission, and we're still going to get slaughtered for him, because he's Steve. Fuck that guy.

"Thank you all," Steve said meanwhile. "I'm so sorry, I didn't—I regret lying to you. Director Carter wouldn't let me go if I asked for an expedition heading for _Brooklyn_. Only Commander Fury would back me up."

"I thought you and Peggy were tight."

"It's a stupid mission. Hopeless. Suicidal even," Steve admitted. "Peggy is anything but. And still… I can't just let it go. I can't."

"Steve," Tony tried. "Look, I've given it some thought, and what the fuck, might as well die chasing ghosts, but it's important for me to know that you know this isn't a rescue mission. Okay? I think I can get global support on that one?" A slew of nods across the room urged him onward. "We know Barnes died bloody, and we will go and give him a proper space burial. We can go crazy and shoot him into a sun, not many people get to be buried in a star. We can then start a petition to have it renamed after him, he'd like that, I think. The little I remember of him, anyway. It's going to be a nightmare from every conceivable angle, but we can do it. I'm a genius if I say so myself, I'm sure I can come up with a force-field generator that will get a coffin to the surface of the sun. But you gotta admit he is dead, Steve. I'll chase corpses, sure, but I'm not going to try and wrestle Casper, alright?"

"He's right, Steve." Sam said gently. "Even if he survived that, the best cryo units we have now can guarantee no more than ten years of life-support on internal power cells. What they had on _Brooklyn_ was dependent on outside power, and we know the power was down."

"I know that," Steve told the floor. "Don't you think I don't know that? I helped to design that ship. I know everything about it."

"Then why?"

"Because… I need to know." Steve looked up, his gaze grim. "Bucky went because I asked him to. He'd just got out of the army, and I talked him into going into space, because I couldn't. I wanted to, but no one in their right mind would take me; with the way I was take-off alone would kill me. I thought… I thought if I couldn't go, then sending Bucky was the next best thing. I owe it to him to find out what went wrong." His lips were actually trembling. "He promised to bring me a star as a gift."

"Somewhere in the afterlife Shakespeare is ripping you off right now," Tony said. "The only way I could be more touched would be if one of you was somehow a vampire. But sure, let's all get slaughtered in the name of love." He had a vague inkling, as the words left his mouth, that he would remember them later, and quite possibly will be forced to eat them, but what the hell, YOLO and all. It was a proud family tradition to get murdered by space monsters, and who was Tony to spit on tradition.

Truth be told Tony didn't really believe they were going to get slaughtered. He did research before he went exposing scams, research like analyzing the available material from every possible angle, and what he gathered was that the space monster breathed, so chances were it wasn't doing too hot in a dead ship, which is why Tony volunteered to accompany the reconnaissance mission. Steve may have claimed superior knowledge of the ship, but, and all due respect to the good captain's marvelous brain, he wasn't an engineer. Nothing suggested they were going to get jumped, anyway. _Brooklyn_ was dead, just a dark, empty husk drifting through space, at exactly the coordinates Cap had calculated. It was awe-inspiring, in a way, to see something so old move through the emptiness. He had to give it to the old man – he built decent ships.

"Looks good," Tony said, locking down the cable connecting the _Avenger_ to _Brooklyn_. "Don't expect miracles, but do expect gravity."

"Tony, hold back," Cap had said. "Let us make sure it's safe, first."

"It's dead, Cap." And how. It took a solid jump just to get the old girl to feed.

"Doesn't mean it's safe, Stark," Natasha said. Her slim figure moved through the shadows of the hull, hitting the metal with what would have been a dull thump, had an atmosphere been around to propagate the sound. "I detect no movement, but the hull is pressurized. Don't know about air quality though, so keep your helmets on."

"Are we keeping the pressure?"

"Might come in useful. I'm setting charges on the gates." Natasha replied, as she pressed a series of discs along the crevice that marked the cargo bay entrance. "Code word: Budapest will activate magnets in our boots and blow the charges."

"Ah, Budapest," Clint sighed into their ears from his post on _Avenger_ 's hull, ready with a gravity beam, in case they needed extraction. "A gift that keeps on giving. All green on the canon, sir."

"Roger that," Rogers said. "How are we with entering?"

"Looks like an hour." Natasha let go of the bay door and floated to the side, where Thor and Sam were muscling their way in through an emergency pod. That phase of the plan went swimmingly. So did the part where they shimmied through the airlock and into cargo bay without tripping any booby-traps and had to group-hug Rogers because of what they found there. The ship seemed to be in order, to Tony's expert eye, barring the ginormous splatter of rusty brown in the cargo bay.

"Walk it off, Steve," Natasha said, hand on his elbow, and slipped into the captain's proverbial chair. "Stick to the plan. We go through the ship top to bottom, mark every room you clear. Shortest way to medbay is through there."

Instant foreboding, if you asked Tony, which no one did, hopefully because they were all too busy feeling it. The door was barricaded, which was possibly the most disconcerting thing to find on a spaceship, because it was barricaded from the inside of the cargo bay, and who took refuge in the fucking cargo bay? It was an unholy mess with no clear line of sight and creepy crates stacked along the walls, interconnected like the world's largest, creepiest battery project. Tony built something like that, once, when he was eight. It went ticking for far longer than it should have, according to original specs.

"Eyes around your head," Steve said in a low voice, gripping his rifle.

Oh good, so Tony's initial impression of "no other exit" was correct. Brilliant. That was just fucking brilliant. Twenty light years away from home and he would die in the most cliché of horror movie scenarios.

"Need an order, Cap," Sam said, hand on the door. He tapped the screen at his wrist a couple of times. "I got thin, but breathable, atmo in here, and pressure out there, but closer to the door I'm starting to detect traces of chlorine. The door's not 100% airtight, there's damage, and the other side is gonna smell pretty vile."

They were going to go through, Tony realized immediately. Which was fine! Completely fine. It was exactly what he wanted, traipsing through an abandoned ship filled with highly corrosive gas. No one would ever accuse Captain Steve Rogers of not taking his crew on fun dates, Tony thought as he stared at the ceiling. Something kept nagging at him. Something was amiss, which meant he'd missed it, which, by definition, was Not Okay. Tony swept the cargo bay once more, frowning. Why didn't he bring _Brooklyn_ 's manifest with him? What could they possibly have that would fit in those kind of crates?

What did they have on board that was ten feet long and about three wide, he thought idly as Thor and Sam chiseled patiently at the door. What about the wires, a crude bundle of which was taped to the side of one crate, part of the bundle disappearing within, part into the grating on the floor, where it just lied loose and pointless, and in direct contact with the floor.

The floor, which was faintly magnetized, thanks to the gravity engines they brought back to life by hooking the _Avenger_ to _Brooklyn_ , certainly enough to send a signal through a naked wire.

Tony was looking at a lousiest, most pre-school-level, alarm clock.

Here was his cue to sound the alarm, here was his cue to yell "I told you so!" as loud as his comm unit allowed, except that was the moment Thor and Sam finally dismantled the barricade blocking their way and attacked the door in triumph.

There were, Tony would later think, not enough "I told you so" greeting cards in the whole galaxy. What happened before his internal Hallmark spending spree was this: as soon as the barricade was dismantled a shadow sprung from the darkness between the crates and all five thousand pounds of Thor's Nordic glory went flying. The arm that ripped him from the door was shiny and reflexive, but even that gem had to wait, because something struck the door from the other side, pushing Sam away, and then that something crawled out of the open door, swathed in dramatic, yellowish billows. It was humanoid and at the same time anything but; its stubby arms and legs tapered into claws and half-formed tentacles, its face a gleaming, robotic skull, too small for its broad shoulders. Yet despite all that, the worst thing was—

Okay, no, the worst thing was that here in high-definition Tony could clearly see that the creature wasn't a robot but rather a human with robot parts growing out of him. Probably him, anyway, when his brain deigned to kick in Tony would match the general shape to the crew of _Brooklyn_. That it was horrifyingly familiar was just an added bonus: this was the creature whose shape Tony had seen only as a shadow on a video, and in all of his nightmares since. And look, the lurching, unstable motion wasn't a product of the video quality!

"Oh god," Tony choked out, because the thing was leaping, and it was coming straight at him, its claws extended, tearing through the suit on his chest, _tearing through his chest_ —

Then it was gone. Tony heard the screech of metal and a second screech, one which could have come from a living creature if the creature had lungs made of steal. The thing slammed into the grate on the floor, still screeching, grasping at the hand holding it, leaving bloodied gauges in its wake, and it was a hand, not a suit, there was no barrier to tear, and how odd was that, Tony though dimly.

He heard someone yell at him, felt the pressure against his chest, but the sweetest of all was the sound of slamming door and the man who stood in front of it, blood dripping down his right arm, light of the torches glimmering on the steel of his left.

Had to be better than the suits, Tony thought, dimly. Iron. Steel and iron. Well, not iron, iron was a poor choice, rust, ugh, but steel. Titanium. Durasteel. Except maybe the choice was poorly made, no armor should dig into the skin like that, no steel should eat into the flesh. But oh, what possibilities! The steel hand began to rebuild the barricade, piece by piece, curving the metal to fit into the crevasses of the hull, working in silence, moving in perfect tandem with its flesh counterpart and Tony might be a little bit in love.

The man didn't seem to be breathing overly much, and curiously enough neither was Steve. No, their esteemed captain was frozen in time, his gloved fist shoved uncomfortably into Tony's chest cavity – which, ouch – keeping it closed, despite the fact that something very fundamental was unravelling right there inside of his pretty blond head.

"Steve," Tony wheezed. "Take a breath."

"Bucky," Steve said.

"Later, later. Breathe."

"Bucky," Steve insisted, hysteria and pain in his voice. Tony didn't understand why. If this was Bucky, then surely hey ho and hooray? Sure, he looked a little feral, what with the mess of dark hair spilling over his shockingly smooth face, and insane, because here was Tony, freezing his ass off in a temperature-controlled suit and apparently-Bucky wore skin-tight shorts, the likes anyone who spent any time in cryo was intimately familiar with. There were rivulets of cryo-gel giving his pale skin an unhealthy blueish sheen in the light of the torches the rest of them had mounted to their suits. And then there was the arm. Ah, the arm! Something magnificent was happening there, because the arm was moving and it was breathtaking to watch, the ripple of metal, the strength there, Tony was possibly on Heaven's doorstep in elation.

"Stay with me, Tony!" he heard Wanda's voice in his earpiece. "We're coming for you!"

Or, it might have been the hole in his chest and sudden depressurization of his suit. Kind of a toss-up really.

"Nobody kiss me," Tony said with the firmness of a newborn kitten, and lost consciousness.

When he woke there was a battery hardwired into his chest, keeping his heart from getting skewered by whatever shrapnel the clawy thing had left behind, and Rogers was at his side in the cramped medbay, gripping his wrist with one hand and cooing gently at a pile of blankets in a gutted cryo unit with whatever brainpower he had to spare. The babbling seemed important, so Tony kept his peace as he slipped back into sleep, and dreamt of robotic arms and the future of medicine. When he woke again Wanda was at his side, spinning wild tales no one with a brain could possibly believe: stories about robots which made themselves organic by latching onto flesh, about AIs that malfunctioned, monsters that awaited incautious programmers, and long dead fathers turning out to be, in fact, long dead. Frankly, Tony didn't believe a word of it, although it might have been because he dozed halfway through.

"You know what, I think I'm good," Tony said, once he woke up for good to discover the absolute amateur hour that'd gone into keeping his chest from going full-on Tinman. Sure, it worked, but honestly, what was he, an archeology project? Who used batteries anymore, when mini-arc reactors were a thing?

But what really made his day, no questions asked, was that when he very tentatively brought up _Brooklyn_ during one of the mandatory group visits, implying that he maybe wanted to kill it with fire, the overwhelming majority voted "fuck yes, mission parameters be damned". And that was how Tony, fresh out of heart surgery, found himself in a suit that fit him only so-so, re-wiring the engines and deflector shields. No big, really, if his father could reverse-engineer a flesh-machine interface well enough to craft a functional arm and not kill the patient while dying of shrapnel causes, Tony could rig a ship's shield to withstand solar winds long enough to get swallowed by the plasma.

That's right, he thought viciously. Fuck his dead father. Fuck him so much Tony was going to kill himself by giving him the most expensive, elaborate funeral in human history.

This was how the crew of the _Avenger_ gathered in the fishbowl that was their mess hall, to watch USS _Brooklyn_ head for what would be known as the greatest funeral pyre known to mankind: Gliese 832. Hell if they didn't deserve fireworks, and by they Tony mostly meant Barnes: there were five working, stable and occupied cryo units in their cargo hold, with only superficial scratch marks. Barnes himself, despite being as stable as a pile of loose uranium, was curled up on the couch, wrapped in three blankets and Rogers besides, from which he watched a star swallow up the ship and all the nightmares within.

Also Tony's dead dad, but that was neither here nor there. He wasn't going to mention it.

"'s a star," Barnes muttered unexpectedly, slurring the words into Steve's neck. "See? Told ya I'd bring you a star."

Yeah, no one could really fault Rogers for bursting into hysterical tears.

"Hey Maximoff," Tony said, once he got carted back to medbay with the firm order to suck down a painkiller cocktail and take it easy for a while. "You asked Rogers if he got picks for the lottery back home? I like the odds he's gambling with."

"Sleep, Tony," Wanda said with a laugh, and sure, sure, sleep sounded good right about now. Sleep sounded great, even better than the lottery.

Tony slept, and dreamed of welding.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> I had this urge to write something reminiscent of _Interstellar_ , but I somehow always gravitate towards _Alien_. I couldn't explain why, it just happens. I hope you enjoy this, silverfoxflower!  <3


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